A “Human Right” to Other People’s Money

One of the many differences between advocates of freedom and supporters of statism is how they view “rights.”

Libertarians, along with many conservatives, believe in the right to be left alone and to not be molested by government. This is sometimes referred to in the literature as “negative liberty,” which is just another way of saying “the absence of coercive constraint on the individual.”

Statists, by contrast, believe in “positive liberty.” This means that you have a “right” to things that the government will give you (as explained here by America’s second-worst President). Which means, of course, that the government has an obligation to take things from somebody else. How else, after all, will the government satisfy your supposed right to a job, education, healthcare, housing, etc.

Sometimes, the statists become very creative in their definition of rights.

Austerity programmes agreed with the troika of international lenders (the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) are in breach of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, according to a German legal expert. …under the EU charter of fundamental rights, a legal text which became binding for member states in 2009, several austerity measures enshrined in the MoUs can be fought in courts. …His study highlights that the MoUs “have seriously limited the autonomy of employers and trade unions to negotiate wages.” …Education and health care reforms prescribed in the memorandums are also questionable because they are focusing too much on cutting budgets, he said. …He noted that the concept of “financial stability” was put above all other considerations. “But financial stability cannot be achieved without social stability,” he said.

But it’s not just one oddball academic making these claims.

…the Council of Europe’s social rights committee noted that public policies since 2009 have been unable to stem a generalised increase in poverty on the continent. The committee identified some 180 violations of European Social Charter provisions on access to health and social protection across 38 European countries. In the bailed-out countries, the committee found several breaches – particularly in terms of wages and social benefits. Ireland was found in breach of the social charter for not ensuring the minimum levels of sickness, unemployment, survivor’s, employment injury and invalidity benefits. Greece and Cyprus have “inadequate” minimum unemployment, sickness, maternity and old age benefits, as well as a restrictive social security system. Spain also pays too little to workers on sick leave.

This crazy thinking also exists in the United States. A former Carter Administration official, now a law professor at Georgetown, has written that countries with good policy must change their systems in order to enable more tax revenue in nations with bad policy.

Do states like Switzerland, which provide a tax haven for wealthy citizens of developing countries, violate internationally recognized human rights? …bank secrecy has a significant human rights impact if governments of developing countries are deprived of resources needed to meet basic economic rights guaranteed by the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. …The Covenant explicitly recognizes individual rights to adequate food, clothing, and housing (Article 11); health care, clean water, and sanitation (Article 12); and education (Article 13). The Covenant also imposes obligations on member states to implement these rights.

And the right to redistribution isn’t just part of the U.N. mission.

There’s also a European set of Maastricht Principles which supposedly obligates nations to help each expand the burden of government.

Articles 19 and 20 of The Maastricht Principles call on states to “refrain from conduct which nullifies or impairs the enjoyment and exercise of economic . . . rights of persons outside their territories . . . or which impairs the ability of another State to comply with that State’s . . . obligations as regards economic rights.” …recognizing the fact that secrecy for offshore accounts makes it difficult for developing countries to implement Covenant obligations. It therefore seems indisputable that offshore accounts impede the fulfillment of internationally recognized human rights.

You may be thinking that it’s absurd to trample national sovereignty in pursuit of bad policy. And you’re right.

And you may be thinking this is a complete bastardization of what America’s Founding Fathers had in mind. And you’re right.

But you probably don’t understand that this already is happening. The IRS’s awful FATCA legislation, for instance, is basically designed for exactly the purpose of coercing other nations into enforcing bad American tax policy.

P.S. And the Obama Administration already is pushing policies to satisfy the OECD’s statist regime. The IRS recently pushed through a regulation that says American banks have to put foreign tax law above U.S. tax law.

In my book Credentialed to Destroy I go though the Global Competency document the Common Core sponsoring agency, the CCSSO, also released to guide the real implementation. It incorporates those Maastricht Principles, by name, into what US students are to be taught as well.

Sometimes your word evoke tears and sometimes the output of your keyboard spurs spontaneous out-loud laughter but you always make me think. We homeschool and our boys are now learning about ‘negative and positive’ liberty. Your post today will be the subject of their next essay and thy will love it! Thanks again. http://coldwarwarrior.com/

The world would be a much nicer place without gravity, or at least less gravity. Let’s make that a human right too.

Or let’s make the right to prosperity through confiscation of 60% of people’s efforts a human right too.

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Europe now has a 3% growth deficit to the rest of the world. Relentless and perpetually compounding the continent into decline. At best, modest reforms will be enacted (indeed even Hollande is now considering “harsh right wing reforms”). The reforms will be modest and only slightly dent the growth deficit. Voter-lemmings will conclude that reforms don’t work and seek new statist hope in the extreme statist right of extreme statist left. These situations are irreversible. There is still a lot of pain and a long way down before the misery of hitting bottom finally forces European voter-lemmings to reform. Its a long way before they completely run out of other people”s money and other indirect (but equally detrimental) forms of redistribution. In the past, this European process of hitting bottom was realized through war. The immediately obvious high cost of that option in the modern world, will fortunately eliminate that option. So decline and bottom-hitting will have to occur through other, perhaps slower, processes. Hope in prosperity and statism, hope of prosperity through forced recruitment of the individual to homogenized and harmonized societal goals, never ends well…
Pain and decline will be once again the final outcome for Europe,…and its imitators.

Europe will continue its decline, and that includes the supposedly “strong” European economies like Germany. They are only labelled strong in a relative sense, because, as they say in Greece: “Amongst the blind, the one eyed is king”. In today’s world, a country that rides a 1.5-2% growth trendline, is still a country in perpetual compounding decline. This deficit will only compound and accelerate.

Follow Barak Hollande to the same fate.
But decline can be somewhat pleasant, at least the initial years of the great smorgasbord are. So on we shall go,…forward…

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As I have said in the past, humanity will finally turn one more corner when a few breakaway nations finally reach the point where the benefits of breaking free from the UN, OECD, G8-50, IMF cartels outweigh the risks an consequences of vindictive retribution. That time will eventually come, and those are the countries to watch. Switzerland is on a good path, and what it promotes as neutrality is essentially independence. But without nuclear weapons, its future is uncertain surrounded by statists — which BTW puts freedom loving people in a conundrum as nukes are an inherently statist weapon.

speaking of breakaway nations… there seems to be a resurgence of European Separatism… over 40 political parties and civic movements have become part of the “European Free Alliance”… these folks seem to be moving toward independence from the central governments… the movements are active in the UK… Spain…France… Italy… and other nations as well… recently there was a 1.5-million-person demonstration in Barcelona in support of Catalonian independence… on September 18th 2014 Scotland will vote on independence from Great Britain… what this movement will mean for the future of the European Union is uncertain… but it is another development which further complicates the EU narrative of a united Europe…

As I read this, I thought for a moment that the official name of the agreement was the “Orwellian Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters”. I guess they call it the OMCMAATM for short. Well, maybe I shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that that’s NOT the official name. Many political leaders today probably think that being described as “Orwellian” is a compliment.

Reblogged this on Right From Yaad and commented:
Right From Yaad is all over. I work close to Dan Mitchell.

I need to somehow find away to have lunch with him. In this article, one of his best pieces, he highlights the misuse of “rights” by statists. An attempt to lure in the people into the comforting arms of big government….and by the looks of things, from the examples the world over he has used, it appears that the “New World Order” is closer at hand. Perhaps closer than we think.